Leading indicator based assessment of operational readiness in electronics subjected to multiple environments

Field deployed electronics may accrue damage due to environmental exposure and usage after finite period of service but may not often have any macro-indicators of failure such as cracks or delamination. A method to interrogate the damage state of field deployed electronics in the pre-failure space may allow insight into the damage initiation, progression, and remaining useful life of the deployed system. Aging has been previously shown to effect the reliability and constitutive behavior of second-level leadfree interconnects. Prognostication of accrued damage and assessment of residual life can provide valuable insight into impending failure. In this paper, field deployed parts have been extracted and prognosticated for accrued damage and remaining useful life in an anticipated future deployment environment. A subset of the field deployed parts have been tested to failure in the anticipated field deployed environment to validate the assessment of remaining useful life. In addition, some parts have been subjected to additional know thermo-mechanical stresses and the incremental damage accrued validated with respect to the amount of additional damage imposed on the assemblies. The presented methodology uses leading indicators of failure based on micro-structural evolution of damage to identify accrued damage in electronic systems subjected to sequential stresses of thermal aging and thermal cycling. Damage equivalency methodologies have been developed to map damage accrued in thermal aging to the reduction in thermo-mechanical cyclic life based on damage proxies. The expected error with interrogation of system state and assessment of residual life has been quantified. Prognostic metrics including α-λ metric, sample standard deviation, mean square error, mean absolute percentage error, average bias, relative accuracy, and cumulative relative accuracy have been used to compare the performance of the damage proxies.